Therapeutic Insights: Earthly and Cosmic Laws

Schmidt Number: S-4530

On-line since: 30th September, 2009

Lecture II

Dornach, June 26, 1921

Two days ago we
spoke of the time in which people still had a kind of inward
knowledge. We gave as an example what an ancient Greek would
have thought about the contemporary scientific world
conception. Then I tried to show you how such a Greek, from
the point of view of Imaginative cognition, would have
described what we are accustomed to calling the human etheric
body in relation to the element of water.

I said that
Imaginative cognition would reveal a certain relationship of
the entire activity of water, that surging and weaving of the
water element, the striving toward the periphery, the sinking
down toward the earth, a relationship of these forces of
unfolding toward the periphery and toward the center with the
shapes, with the pictures of the plant element in its
individual forms. We thus arrive here at a concrete
formulation of the content of the Imaginative world, at least
one part of the Imaginative world. Such a knowledge can only
be attained practically for human perception if a development
is striven for, as it has been described in my book,
How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,
whose goal is Imaginative cognition.

Even with
Imaginative cognition, however, one remains unacquainted with
what, in an earlier world conception, was called the element
of air. This airy element, such as it was conceived in more
ancient times, can be penetrated only by so-called Inspired
cognition. If you attempt to clarify the following to
yourself, you will approach this Inspired cognition, this
experience of the airy element. I have often mentioned to you
that the human being today is studied quite superficially.
Just call to mind how anatomical and physiological pictures
of the human being are made today. Sharp outlines are drawn
around the inner organs — heart, lungs, liver, and so on
— and certainly these well-defined contours, these
boundary lines of heart, lung, and liver, have a certain
justification. In using such lines, however, we draw the
human being as though he were through and through a solid
body, which he really is not. Only the slightest portion of
the human being consists of solid mineral substances. Even if
we were to take a maximum, as it were, we could consider at
most a mere 8 per cent as solid in the human being; 92 per
cent of the human being is a column of fluid. Man is not
solid at all; the solid is only deposited within the human
being. There is very little consciousness of this fact at
present among the pupils of physiology, anatomy, and so on.
We do not learn to recognize the watery human being, the
fluid human being, when we draw him with solid boundaries to
his organs, for the fluid human being is something that is in
a continual streaming. His organism is something that moves
continually .within itself, and into this fluid organism the
airy organism now inserts itself. The air streams in, uniting
with the substances within and, if I may describe it in this
way, stirring them up.

By means of the
fact that the human being has this airy element within, he
actually forms a complete unity with the outer world. The air
that is now within me will presently be outside me again. We
cannot really speak of the human being as enclosed within his
skin if we observe him with reference to this third element,
the airy element. And even less could we speak of him as
living contained within his skin if we contemplated him with
reference to the warmth element, the element of fire. One
cannot say that man is a self-contained being.

Now, however,
let us take the entire human being, that is, the human being
who is organized not only in the solid element but also in
the fluid, airy, and warmth elements, in a configured, moving
warmth. Let us compare this entire human being with the human
being as he is when he is asleep, with his soul and spirit
outside the physical and etheric bodies. What permeates the
human being as soul and spirit from awakening to falling
asleep is simply not there in the time between falling asleep
and awakening. In that time the human being is in another
world that is penetrated by another lawfulness. We must ask
ourselves, now, which lawfulness permeates the world in which
man finds himself between falling asleep and awakening.

Yesterday we
mentioned four kinds of lawfulnesses: first, the lawfulness
within the earthly world; second the lawfulness within the
cosmic world; third, the lawfulness within the world soul;
and fourth, the lawfulness within the world spirit. Where,
then, is the human being with his soul and spirit — or
with his soul aspect and his I— between falling asleep
and awakening? A consideration of what we have said up to now
will show that the astral body and I at this time (between
falling asleep and awakening) are in the realm of the world
soul and the world spirit.

1. Lawfulness within the earthly world.

2. Lawfulness within the cosmic world.

3. Lawfulness within the world soul.

}

Astral Body, I

4. Lawfulness within the world spirit.

We must take
very seriously something we mentioned two days ago, that with
the first two worlds, the earthly and the cosmic, we have
exhausted the whole realm of space. By entering the realm of
world soul and world spirit, we have already gone beyond the
realm of space. This is something we must dwell upon within
our souls again and again: every time the human being sleeps,
he is led not only outside his physical body but beyond
ordinary space. He is led into a world that should not be
confused at all with the world that can be perceived by the
senses. All lawfulness that lies at the basis of the
rhythmical human being — the human being whose fluid
and also whose airy element is organized through rhythm
— comes from this world. Rhythm manifests itself in
space, but the source of rhythm, the lawfulness that produces
rhythm, streams into every point in space from extra-spatial
depths. It is regulated everywhere by a real world that lies
beyond the sense world. If we are confronted with that
wonderful reciprocal play that takes place within the human
rhythms, through breathing and the pulse, we actually
perceive something in this rhythm that is regulated from
extra-spatial spiritual depths and brought into the world in
which the human being also finds himself as physical man. It
is impossible to understand the airy element if we do not
reach such a concrete understanding of the rhythmical
expression of man within this airy element.

If one grasps
with Imagination what I described two days ago as the weaving
and being of the plant world and, parallel with this, the
weaving and being of the human etheric body, then one remains
still within the world in which one normally resides. One
must think of oneself as being transported from the earth, so
to speak, and poured out into the entire cosmos. Then,
however, in passing into the airy element, one must remove
oneself from space. Then there must be the possibility of
knowing oneself in a world that is no longer spatial but that
exists only in time, a world in which only the time element
holds a certain significance. In the times in which such
things were still livingly perceived, it was seen that what
belonged to such worlds could really be observed in the way
that the spiritual played into human activity through rhythm.
I pointed out to you how the ancient Greek formulated the
hexameter: three pulse beats with the caesura, which gives a
breath, and three more pulse beats with the caesura, or with
the end of the verse, which gives the full hexameter. In two
breaths one has the corresponding eight pulse beats. The
harmonious resounding of the pulse beats with the breathing
was shaped artistically in the recitation of the Greek
hexameter. The way in which the spiritual, super-sensible
world permeates the human being, how it permeates the blood
circulation, the blood rhythm, synthesizes four pulse beats,
four pulse rhythms, to one breathing rhythm — all this
was reflected in every speech formation that is in the
hexameter. All original strivings to build verse derive from
this rhythmic organization of the human being.

The world from
which this rhythmic self-activity derives becomes real for
the human being only when he becomes conscious during sleep.
The activity in which the sleeping, but conscious human being
then lives plays into this rhythm. Ordinary everyday
consciousness remains unconscious of what lies at the
foundation of this, and this is even more the case with the
ordinary, present-day scientific consciousness. If this does
become conscious, however, there begins to appear before the
human being something more than what I described yesterday as
the surging, weaving plant world. Something appears that is
not a picture merely of the ordinary animal world, which must
be spatial; there appears now a very clear consciousness, one
which, however, can appear only outside the body and never
within it, a consciousness whose content consists of the
concrete pictures out of which the shapes of the animals in
space are formed. Just as our human rhythmic activity streams
in from the extra-spatial, so do the shapes that then
organize themselves into the different animals stream in from
the extra-spatial.

The first thing
that is experienced if one undergoes consciously what
otherwise is gone through only unconsciously between falling
asleep and awakening, immersing oneself in the world that is
the source of our rhythm, is that the animal world in all its
forms becomes comprehensible. The animal world in all its
forms cannot be explained by means of outer physical
foundations or forces. If a zoologist or a morphologist
believes that the form of the lion, the tiger, the butterfly,
the beetle, is able to be explained by means of something
found in physical space, he is very much fooling himself. In
physical space one can never find an explanation for the
different forms of the animals. One encounters the
explanation in the way I have described it only if one enters
the third lawfulness, the lawfulness of the world soul.

Now, I would
like to return to the conversation I presented two days ago
between the ancient Greek and the modern scholar who knows
everything — that is to say, although occasionally he
admits to not knowing everything, he still pretends that
everything is able to be explained along lines similar to his
own way of thinking. The ancient Greek would say,
“Nothing at all can be explained by your method, though
it has a kind of logic. You list all kinds of abstract
conceptual forms, so-called categories — being,
becoming, having, and so on. This logic is something that is
supposed to represent the lawfulness of the concepts, the
ideas.” (I am thinking now of a Greek of the
pre-Socratic age, a Greek of the time from which the
philosophies of Thales, Heraclitus, and Anaxagoras emanated,
of which only a portion survives today.) “What you call
logic,” this Greek would say, “was first
constructed by a human being, a human being who really no
longer knew much about the mysteries of the world. This logic
was first made by Aristotle, after he had thoroughly applied
his mundane intellect to Platonism. Truly Aristotle was a
great man, but he was also a great Philistine who completely
corrupted the actual logic, who made real logic into an
ephemeral web that is related to reality in the same way as a
thinly spun phantom is related to something densely real. The
real logic,” our ancient Greek, being a scientist in
his way, would have said, “the real logic encompasses
all those forms that become outward and spatial in the animal
world and that one discovers on becoming conscious in the
time between falling asleep and awakening. That is logic,
that is the real content of the logical
consciousness.”

In the animal
world there exists nothing but that which exists also in the
human being, but in the human being it is spiritualized and
thus he can think. He can think the logical formulas that
swim in the outer world in space and become animals. When,
between awakening and falling asleep, we manipulate our
conceptual forms in ordinary consciousness, connecting one
concept with another, it is so that we actually do the same
thing in the realm of ideas that the outer world does in
shaping the various forms of the animals. Just as it is
possible to observe one's etheric when turning one's gaze to
the plants and thinking of this plant world as embedded in
the element of water, so, in the same way, one's soul world
— or it can be called the astral world — can be
comprehended if one permeates oneself with this living
weaving that becomes conscious between falling asleep and
awakening, understanding thereby the outer shapes of the
animal world. One must then think of one's own shaping of the
world of ideas as woven into the rhythm of the airy
element.

You can make
yourself a quite concrete mental image from the many things I
have pointed out to you concerning the human being. Take the
following process quite concretely: you breathe in, and the
air follows the well-known pathway to the lungs. In breathing
in, however, the inhaled air presses upon the space
containing the spinal cord and spinal fluid. This fluid
surrounding the spinal cord rhythmically courses through the
subarachnoid space of the brain. The cerebral fluid comes
into activity, and this activity is the activity of thought.
In reality, thought rides on the breath, which is transmitted
to the cerebro-spinal fluid, and this fluid in which the
brain floats transmits the rhythmical beat of the breath
directly onto the brain. In the brain live the impressions of
the senses, the impressions of the eyes, the ears, through
nerve-sense activity. The breathing rhythm comes into
confrontation with what lives in the brain from the senses,
and in this confrontation develops the interplay between
sensation and thought activity, that formal thought activity
which outwardly has its life in the animal forms. It is this
thought activity, which is brought about by the breathing
rhythm, transmitting itself to the cerebro-spinal fluid in
the subarachnoid space, that commingles with what lives in
the brain through the senses. 'Residing there is everything
that becomes active in us in the form of ideas out of the
rhythm.

What is
essential, my dear friends, is that you attempt gradually to
penetrate into the way in which the spiritual plays into the
physical world. The great cultural defect of our time is that
we have a science that arrives at the spirit in abstract
forms, in purely intellectual forms, whereas the spiritual
must be conceived in its creative element, for otherwise the
material world remains like something hard, unconquered,
outside the spiritual. We must penetrate into how this
element of the third and fourth lawfulnesses plays concretely
into what we ourselves carry out.

It is one of
the most sublime things that can become clear to us if we
recognize the actual inner basis that can prevail in every
breathing rhythm — what is not fulfilled but what could
be fulfilled each time an inhalation plays into the
cerebro-spinal fluid. Now comes the recoil, the response: the
cerebro-spinal fluid is again pressed down through the
subarachnoid space of the spine, and there is an exhalation.
This is a surrender once again to the world, a merging with
the world. However, in this I-becoming/merging-with-the-world
lies in essence what is expressed in the breathing
rhythm.

This is the way
one must speak if one wishes to speak of the reality that is
meant when speaking of the element of air, whereas in
speaking about the earth one simply encompasses everything
that is included in our seventy-odd chemical elements. You
see, what becomes a corpse is subject to the lawfulness of
the seventy-two elements. What brings this dead body into
movement, however, so that it can grow, can digest, is
something that streams in from the cosmos. Then what
penetrates this organism so that it not only grows and is
able to digest but unfolds itself continually in a rhythmical
activity, in the pulse, in the breathing rhythm, comes from
an extra-spatial world. We study this extra-spatial world in
the air element, for that is where it reveals itself, just as
we study the cosmic — and not the earthly — world
in the water element, for that is where the cosmic is
revealed. What is revealed to the present-day chemist or
physicist derives only from the earth element differentiated
in itself.

We can also
find the transition to the warmth element or element of fire.
This is really possible only in the moment that is a
practical result when a human being attains the ability not
only to move out of his body consciously but to immerse
himself with this consciousness into other beings. There is
something else to consider here. One may already have had the
ability for a long time to move out of one's body; if a
little egotism is retained regarding the world, however, one
is able to grasp everything of which I have spoken up to now,
but one cannot really immerse oneself in this outer world.
One cannot surrender oneself to this outer world. If,
however, elements of true super-sensible love can be added
during an immersion into that world in which one lives
between falling asleep and awakening, then one learns to
recognize by experience the element of warmth or fire. Only
then does one recognize the true being of man, for what is
looked at outwardly through the senses is only a semblance of
man, is the human being from the other side, from the side of
semblance.

If one ascends
to the element of water, one has, to begin with, the
experience of the etheric being of man dissolving. The
etheric being of man becomes, you could say, a miniature
picture of winter, summer, autumn, and so on. If one comes to
the element of air, one becomes aware of a self-sustaining,
rhythmical movement. The contained human being, the human
being as he is eternal man, can be known only within the
element of warmth. There everything comes into connection
once again: the weaving movement of the water element and the
rhythms of the air come together. They harmonize and
deharmonize themselves in the warmth element, in the fire
element, and there one can recognize the real being of man.
There one is essentially in the fourth lawfulness, the
lawfulness of the world spirit.

In hearing
about an earlier science of the four elements — earth,
water, air, and fire — one should not picture that we
have progressed so wonderfully far with our modern science.
One should rather picture that an altogether different
consciousness existed concerning the roots of the human being
in super-sensible depths. Something was known, therefore, of
the various relationships of the earth element to this
super-sensible. The earth element is, as it were, entirely
outside the sphere of the super-sensible. The water element
already begins to approach it; this water element is already
much more closely connected with the world of spheres spread
in cosmic space than with what the earth itself is. We leave
space altogether, however, if we look for the source of what
is within us as the air rhythm — and therefore our air
organization — for regarding our air organization we
are rhythmicizing, derhythmicizing, and so on. Finally we
come to the universally extraspatial, to that which overcomes
time, when we come into the fire element, into the warmth
element. Only here do we come to recognize the entire,
self-contained human being. One really finds this, though in
a corrupted form, if one rediscovers — and it is
already necessary today that one rediscover it — the
literature that appeared before the fifteenth century.

There appeared
a few years ago the work of a Swedish scientist concerning
alchemy. This Swedish scientist read about a process
described by an alchemist, and he commented, “If you
investigate this process today, it turns out to be pure
nonsense; you cannot picture anything of what they are
saying.” It is easy to grasp that the chemist of today,
even the Swede, who is somewhat less prejudiced than the
Central European, takes the expressions in which are clothed
what once existed in the corrupted literature of ancient
times and then finds that nothing emerges from them. I looked
up the process that the good Swedish scientist could not
understand in the same literature that he had read: the
process described there was actually an aspect of the
embryonic process, of embryonic development in the human
being! This became clear very soon. One must be able to read
such matters, however. The modern scientist reads in such a
way that he applies the expressions and vocabulary that he
has learned from his chemistry text. He puts up his flasks
and test tubes and imitates the process described: nonsense!
What he has read is actually describing a portion of the
process that takes place in the mother's body during
embryonic development. You thus can see the abyss that has
appeared between what the modern scientist is able to read
and what was once meant.

All things that
were described in the ancient literature, however, have also
been described again today under the influence of the
concepts of a new spiritual science. If these writings are
not rediscovered, one cannot read them at all. They existed
in an entirely different way from the way we discover them
today. They existed in an instinctive, atavistic way, but
they did exist, and humanity lifted itself, as it were,
beyond an understanding of merely the earth element. We must
find entrance again into the elements that do not explain to
us merely the corpse of the human being but the whole human
being, the living human being. For this it is necessary that
one learn to take quite seriously within our civilization
what is presented in the question of pre-existence.

When the
concept of pre-existence was cast out of Western cultural
evolution, selfless research was actually cast out as well.
When preachers today preach about immortality, as I have
indicated often before, they appeal basically to human
egotism. It is known that man feels uncomfortable, feels
afraid, of the cessation of life. Of course, life does not
actually cease, but in speaking about immortality one appeals
not to the forces of cognition but to man's fear of death, to
man's will to continue living when the body is taken from
him; in other words, man's egotism is appealed to. This is
not possible when one speaks about preexistence. It is
actually inconsequential to people today — from the
point of view of their egotism — whether or not they
lived before they were born or conceived. They are living
now, and of that they are certain, and they are not very
concerned, therefore, with pre-existence. Rather they are
concerned about post-existence, for although they are now
living, they do not know whether they will continue to live
after death. This is connected with their egotism. Since they
are already living, however, they say to themselves —
perhaps only unconsciously or instinctively if they have not
trained in cognition — “I am living now, and even
if I didn't exist before my birth or conception, it makes no
difference to me if I only began to live then, as long as I
can continue to live from now on.”

This is the
mood on the basis of which feelings today are called forth,
through which human beings become enthusiastic about
immortality. In the known languages, therefore, we have a
word for immortality that directs us to the eternity at
life's end, but we do not have a word, in the ordinary
languages of our culture, for “unbornness.” This
is something we must gradually acquire. Such a concept would
speak more to cognition, would speak more to a lack of
egotism, to a cognition of man that is free of egotism. This
must be appealed to once again. Furthermore, cognition must
become permeated by morality, by ethics. Unless our
laboratory table becomes a kind of altar, and unless our
synthesizing and analyzing become a kind of art of the
spirit, and we become conscious that in doing this or that we
participate in world evolution, our cultural evolution will
not progress. We will come into a frightful descent if wider
and wider circles do not perceive that one must achieve
cognition free of egotism, a morally permeated cognition that
must overcome today's analysis and synthesis, which do not
take the higher worlds into any account. One must come to
understand again something of the rhythm that plays into our
lives, something of what plays into warmth. Into the warmth
plays the moral element; and in the simple variations of
warmth, varying intensities of warmth, there is in reality a
world-permeating morality in which the human being develops
himself. All this must gradually become conscious in
humanity. This is not merely what I would like to call an
idealistic whim demanding of us to interpret the signs of our
times; rather, the signs of the times themselves speak of
this deepening toward the super-sensible that must be
attempted.